How to Put a Golden Voice to Your Brand (Or the Most Effective Approach to Developing a Brand Voice)
Previously, I emphasized the points businesses and marketers should aim for when building a brand be it a personal brand or a company brand. This time, let’s talk about a very important element in brand building which, I dauntlessly say, is the element that will decide the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the brand building strategies you’ll adapt later on to win the hearts of customers.
To put it simply, brand voice is how a company or a business talk to its customers. A simple search in Google on brand voice will return tutorials and opinions on ways to develop a brand voice that all speaks about defining the brand’s identity and brand attributes mixed with common-sense tips on how to maintain that voice across all internet marketing channels with heavy emphasis on social media.
While these processes, tips and advices have a nugget of truth, the brand voice resulting from them is no way near golden. It clearly misses the point of having a brand voice - which is to arrest customers to prefer your brand over your competitors and love you - and thus, will make you a drone, just like everybody else.
How to Get that Golden Voice and Speak Like Nobody Else Does
1. Define who is your audience and what they currently think, feel, and do about your brand.
The “audience” alluded to here is simply your target market.
Target market is a segment of the market universe that has the propensity to use or purchase a product or service over and over again. (Wise words I heard from Alex Uypuanco @auypuanco, highly-renowned advertising consultant in Cebu).
The key concept here is “over and over again”. That signifies customer loyalty. In other words, having a truly golden brand voice turns a quotidian customer into a brand advocate every time you speak in any chosen channel be it a radio ad, a tweet, a Facebook status update, a billboard, or a simple email newsletter. Doing step one immediately concentrates all brand voice developing efforts into the customer instead of the company or any business entity – because you won’t be talking to yourself, you’ll be talking to your target market and they’re the ones who bring in the dough.
2. Define what you want your target market to think, feel and do as a result of your brand communication.
In the first step, you face reality and write down what your target market currently think, feel and do (how they use, or not use, it in real life) about your product or service. While you’re looking reality in the face, you might have come across some resistance to your brand, that is, why your target market is not purchasing your brand. It’s directly related to their negative feelings and thoughts about your brand. For most companies and small business, looking dispassionately at itself to address the real problem comes down as a challenge.
In truth, it’s not the product benefit that’s important when you’re selling something but the Resistance. So it’s OK if you’ve uncovered some negativity during the first step. You should be grateful because you have something to get rid of to have a better brand voice. Now, the second step is defining exactly what you want your target market to think, feel and do every time you speak to them from hereon.
For example, you’d want them to:
THINK: YourBrand is a necessary tool…
FEEL: Using YourBrand affects them an air of being a trendsetter…
DO: Use YourBrand and show them off to their friends…
3. Determine the most powerful insight about your target market.
You cannot do this without researching and building a persona of your target market. When you write a user persona, you jot down every single demographical and (most especially) psychographical fact about your target persona. It’s very much like creating a profile of a person – it includes name, age, status, occupation, household income, personality and attitudes, behavior patterns, buying patterns, so on and so forth. The more detailed the description, the better.
Only after profiling your target market persona can you determine the most powerful truth or insight about your audience which will be the very basis of how you will speak to that audience.
4. Determine your brand character and golden voice.
We have come to the final phase. Based on all previous steps, what brand character should come through? In industry-speak, it’s called personification or the attribution of human traits to your brand. The reason is clear-cut: humans only listen to and understand humans. In a more streamlined manner, humans only listen to and understand humans of the same language. By language, I do not mean Russian, Spanish or the English language. I’m referring to language as how words are used to convey a message.
By determining your brand’s character, you can then decide your brand’s personality and style and ultimately, your brand’s golden voice which can impact and arrest your target market the way nobody else can and turn them into loyal customers and brand advocates. Use this golden voice consistently across all communication channels you’ll decide to use, and if you’re doing social media marketing strategies make sure it’s consistent with your offline strategies and speaks the same golden brand voice.
And, oh, one last parting thought:
Get the point?
Cheby writes about live chat insights, improving conversions, epic customer service, online marketing and everything in between. She will take you by the hand in exploring how to extend your website's earning power through Offerchat's smart live chat tool, and even smarter live chat people.
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